In nautilus 49.3, when you change the sort mode (alphabetical, chronological, size …) it moves the scroll position to keep the view centered around the current selected item. While I guess this is useful if you are interested in the finding which files are “close” to the current selected file, this is not what I’m interested in when I change the sort mode, and this not how any other program I know work, (and I believe nautilus did not act that way before version 49 either).
I usually change sort mode to view which file is the newest/oldest/biggest/smallest/etc, so I would much rather that the scroll position stays the same when changing sort mode. With the current implementation, you have to manually scroll back to the top each time you change the sort order.
Moreover, the scroll position changes even if you don’t have any item visibly selected ! In nautilus, if you click outside the item list, it deselects, but the view stays centered around the last selected item when you change the sort mode. If you just landed in a new folder, the first item is implicitly used for view scrolling on sort mode change, but nothing indicates it. I found those behaviors really unintuitive.
My proposal is to entirely drop the “keep view centered around (possibly implicitly) selected item”, and go back to the regular “just keep scroll position”.